Through the Olive Trees

One film builds on another. The next film is a commentary on the last, which in turn is linked to the film before that. This is how we could describe the working method of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami – which results in self-reflective cinema that considers the motivations and methods of the director, the manipulator of fact and fiction within a storyline chosen by him.

Earthquake

The protagonist of Through the Olive Trees is a director who appears in front of the camera and talks about his arrival in Koker, a place that has been hit by a severe earthquake. He’s making the film And Life Goes On (also screening at Eye) which is also a look back at the genesis of Kiarostami’s previous film Where is the Friend’s House? (also screening) shot in the same earthquake zone, although that film doesn’t mention the earthquake.

Parallel

In Through the Olive Trees, we see a filmmaker directing an actor playing a director looking for the lead actors for Where is the Friend’s House? At the same time, the filmmaker is having problems with young bricklayer Hossein, who he’s hiring as an actor and who in the film has to marry a woman who is his girlfriend in real life. Reality and fiction intermingle in a film that is also a self-portrait of a director who just could be Abbas Kiarostami….

Programmer Thijs Havens: “You could see Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s trilogy Kasaba, Clouds of May and Uzak as a parallel to Kiarostami’s ‘Koker trilogy’: they are all films linked at various levels of fiction and non-fiction. In both cases, two of the films from the trilogy deal with the genesis or aftermath of the shooting period of one of the other films, where the director himself (played by an actor) is also a character in the film.”

Screening on 35mm (from the Eye collection) and DCP (2K restoration).